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Thursday, October 16, 2014

UCLA's legal fees in fatal lab fire case neared $4.5 million

After UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran walked out of court in
June, his lawyers issued a news release hailing the "first-of-its-kind"
deal that all but freed him from criminal liability in a 2008 lab fire
that killed a staff researcher. The "deferred prosecution
agreement" that allowed Harran to avoid pleading guilty or no-contest to
any charge might have been a novel resolution, as his attorneys said. But it certainly didn't come cheap.

Top-tier
law firms hired to defend him and the University of California against
felony charges in the death of Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji charged more
than 7,700 billable hours and nearly $4.5 million in fees, according to
documents obtained by The Times through a California Public Records Act
request.

Nearly
five dozen defense attorneys, paralegals and others billed for work on
the case, the records show. One attorney charged $792,000 in fees and at
least four other lawyers billed more than $500,000 each — all for
pretrial work.

The University of California paid the fees out of
its publicly funded pocket. UCLA said in a statement Wednesday that the
expense was justified. "We defended ourselves and our faculty
member as was our right and obligation, using funds in a systemwide
self-insurance program," it said...

As we have noted in prior blog postings on this matter, the case should have been left to civil court by the Los Angeles D.A. The D.A. essentially overreached and - at considerable cost to itself and UCLA - essentially lost. (At one point, the entire Board of Regents was also charged.) In the midst of the case described above, the D.A. charged another UCLA faculty member in a totally unrelated and ridiculous case (which it dropped), seemingly to pressure UCLA in the case above. UCLA is to be applauded for defending faculty members when such circumstances arise.

We note that the LA Times does not report on the cost to the District Attorney's office of processing this case.